ELIPS Studio 3: cross-platform mobile development with Flex
I just happen to stumble across this totally amazing site Open Plug.com. The totally absurd but valid question to ask was…if these guys have done so much in little time, what about Adobe ??. Should we have already seen adobe implement this for its developers ?. Open plug’s solution is the more smarter one, on the mobile platform than what most of us will expect. Its not delivering swf on for the devices, and No! there is no flash player needed to run the code generated either. Elips Studio from openplug lets you create applications with As3 / Flex and compile to native device code for better compliance. Ring a bell yet ?? Yes thats the iPhone packager approach.
I truly feel Adobe should be taking this method as a better approach, rather than getting  Flash player itself on the devices. As you will read across the internet many community people are arguing hot over this. Open plug is a pure example of what should/can be done to make flash/flex grow on the mobile platform. Although i do support adobe on its stand, but you cannot ignore the fact that native code always performs better. The iPhone packager setback, should be a eye opener for the community. Although Apple did a pretty stupid thing by not allowing cross-platform compilation, we still can see how well some of the cross-compiled applications performed on iPhone, that used actionscript  as the development language.
April 18, 2010
Tags: Actionscript 3.0, Flash, Flash Player 10.1, Flex 4, iPhone, Mobile Posted in: Actionscript 3.0, Flex, Mobile
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4 Responses
I have tried Elips last week, and i was targetting symbian device (5530 Express Music) and Windows Mobile device (Touch Pro 2). They provide their Flex SDK implementation (based on Flex 3 SDK, yet Flash Builder only accept v3.5 forward, so i must edit SDK’s XML manually). Elips doing great things, especially when using Flex Halo Component, it is really easy to create cool UI!
Unfortunately, currently their re-implementation of SDK still lack of Graphic class manipulation, and also BitmapData manipulation. Also, What you get on the supplied emulator is rather different when running in real device. Oh, and there’s specific event which is not available for mobile device deployment too e.g there’s no MouseEvent but there’s TouchEvent when targeting touchscreen device.
From the console output when cross-compiling, i know that Elips do translation from AS3 to C++ then compile it natively. This process looks like really complicated and from my experience is not perfect at this time (still beta i guess). Last time i tried to built paint application (simple graphic.drawLine), looks fine in emulator,but did a mess in my device, there’s no line drawn and after a while the application just hang.
However, this solution is pretty cool. I hope Elips just getting better and better.
Yes.. they will definitely evolve. Meanwhile i still dont understand the deal with slider framework. Its pretty straight that flex will never perform as well as native code on any device. Still there seems to be no news of it yet.
The graphic processing issue with elips is probably because, each language has its own technique to handle graphics. Although data handling can be same. But yet i give then a 4.5 out of 5 on what they have achieved till now !
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That is exactly how the iPhone packager that is/was part of Flash CS5 and AIR 2. It compiles into a native application. It seems though that OpenPlug is going to be out of luck too since Apple’s new licensing is going to disallow applications created that way. The will be rejected from the AppStore
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